Best Practices for Online Guided-Selling Experiences

“Guided selling is an approach that attempts to educate consumers about a set of products or services and provide decision-making support that directs them to a solution that is right for them.”

Guided selling is an approach that attempts to educate consumers about a set of products or services and provide decision-making support that directs them to a solution that is right for them. Similar to a helpful salesperson, a software-based guided-selling application leads a consumer through a set of questions that assess their values, intended usage, and knowledge of a particular product category, then directs them to information and products that meet their needs.

This approach is especially helpful in situations where the decision-making process is complex—for example, when purchasing complex products with many features and functions. In addition, this approach is valuable when selling products that are new to the marketplace and in situations where the intended audience is not likely to have knowledge of a product domain. Some obvious examples are consumer electronics and complex products and services relating to healthcare, insurance, financial services, and travel. Guided selling can be helpful in any circumstance where consumers are likely to need help orienting themselves to the available choices, as well as support in making an informed choice.

Guided Selling: What It Is Not

“While … filtering mechanisms are powerful and helpful for people who know what they’re looking for, I don’t consider them to be guided selling.”

Looking at some examples, like those shown in Figure 1, might help you to understand what guided selling is not. Let’s say you’re interested in buying a grill. A typical online shopping experience might present you with a number of filters to help you narrow the set of choices that are available to you. For example, you could select a certain brand of grill, size of cooking area, or type of ignition.

Figure 1—Filtering and narrowing groups of products is not guided selling

While such filtering mechanisms are powerful and helpful for people who know what they’re looking for, I don’t consider them to be guided selling. For shoppers who don’t know what they need, filtering mechanisms don’t guide them toward making an informed choice that meets their needs. For example, what if a shopper doesn’t know what size of cooking area he needs or what grate type would be best for the type of cooking he wants to do?

Guided Selling: What It Is

“Guided selling is an interaction that serves to educate shoppers about a set of products or services.”

In contrast, guided selling is an interaction that serves to educate shoppers about a set of products or services. Typically, it involves having a dialogue or conversation with shoppers to elicit their needs and make recommendations that are specific to their situation, similar to that shown in Figure 2. This interaction is analogous to an in-person experience with a salesperson who knows how to ask the right questions to guide shoppers toward the right product and make them feel confident about their decision.

Such a conversation would likely include a discussion of a shopper’s intended usage or preferences for a product, an explanation of various product features and attributes, a product recommendation based on the personal needs of the shopper, and potentially, a presentation of alternative products and upsell options. In this example, a guided-selling application might ask the shopper about how often he intends to grill, what types of food he likes, and whether he intends to place the grill in an area where it might be difficult to light. Based on the customer’s answers to these questions, the guided-selling experience would suggest certain product options and educate the shopper on why those options would make sense for their situation.

Guided-Selling for Complex Products

“Companies can also use a guided-selling approach to sell complex products and services….”

In addition to selling straightforward consumer products, companies can also use a guided-selling approach to sell complex products and services—for example, heating and cooling systems like that shown in Figure 3; running shoes, in Figure 4; laptop computers, in Figure 5; life insurance, in Figure 6; and mortgages, in Figure 7.

Figure 3—Selling heating and cooling systems

Figure 4—Selling running shoes

Figure 5—Selling laptop computers

Figure 6—Selling life insurance

Figure 7—Selling mortgages

Each of these examples requires a slightly different approach to the conversation, as well as the display of its eventual results and recommendations. Key differences include the

degree to which an application shows and adjusts results as a shopper answers questions

extent to which an application leverages video and audio

presence or absence of progress indicators throughout the questioning portion of the conversation

ability to go back in the conversation or start over

language and presentation of recommendations and next steps

Best Practices

“To help companies make better design decisions for their implementations of guided-selling applications, my company sponsored an independent usability study of existing applications.”

To help companies make better design decisions for their implementations of guided-selling applications, my company sponsored an independent usability study of existing applications. We examined a number of different guided-selling applications that represented a variety of industries, as well as different approaches to navigation and interactions, and we solicited feedback from representative shoppers in several usability testing environments. The following best practices for designing and developing guided-selling applications emerged from those studies:

Enable speed and efficiency.

Use video with caution, but leverage audio to enhance the experience.

Present the consequences of making decisions during questioning.

Show the impact of responses on the recommendations.

Now, let’s look at each of these best practices in greater detail.

Enable Speed and Efficiency

“By far the most important criteria for success in designing a guided-selling experience is the efficiency with which the application asks the necessary questions and moves the shopper through to the recommendations.”

By far the most important criteria for success in designing a guided-selling experience is the efficiency with which the application asks the necessary questions and moves the shopper through to the recommendations. No one wants to spend time entering information unnecessarily—especially if they are unsure or leery of the result.

To increase the perception of speed, a particularly helpful guideline is to limit the number of pages through which a shopper must navigate. Pageless designs and interactions that use progressive disclosure, such as accordion-based designs, were well received by participants in our study.

Figure 8—Accordions, pageless design, and attention to speed

Use Video with Caution, But Leverage Audio to Enhance the Experience

“Video has the potential to be very polarizing or distracting in guided-selling scenarios. There are a number of pitfalls.”

Our tests indicated that video has the potential to be very polarizing or distracting in guided-selling scenarios. There are a number of pitfalls. If the video is low quality, it can appear gratuitous or unnecessary. Also, a video of a person in this context can seem like an intrusive salesperson rather than a helpful one. Finally, we found that shoppers have a tendency to become distracted by trivial or unimportant details in a talking-head video during the question and content portion of the discussion. For example, in the video example shown in Figure 9, several research participants indicated that they were looking at the woman’s outfit rather than listening to what she had to say.

Figure 9—“That’s an ill-fitting suit.”

In contrast, audio alone rather than video can enhance the overall experience without being too distracting. During our tests and through analysis, we discovered that the best experiences leveraged audio to elaborate on or supplement textual information on the screen. The audio enhanced the sense of having a conversation during the guided-selling experience and both educated and engaged participants. To ensure accessibility, shoppers should be able to get through the experience by just reading the text. However, we found that audio can significantly add to the overall effectiveness of such interactions.

Present the Consequences of Making Decisions During Questioning

“If you ask shoppers questions about their preferences and intended use, but they don’t understand why you’re asking those questions or what the consequences of their decisions are, they’ll slow down in making responses and become distrustful.”

If you were shopping for a laptop in a store, a salesperson would ask you questions about more than just your intended use of the laptop during your conversation with him. He would use your answers to his questions as an opportunity to educate you about your choices. This same technique is characteristic of successful online guided-selling experiences.

If you ask shoppers questions about their preferences and intended use, but they don’t understand why you’re asking those questions or what the consequences of their decisions are, they’ll slow down in making responses and become distrustful. Similarly, there may be some questions that don’t apply in a particular case or to which a shopper doesn’t know the answers. To facilitate efficiency throughout a transaction, it is important to present mutually exclusive responses and allow a shopper to skip a question if it doesn’t apply.

Figure 10—Successful questions educate shoppers as they proceed through the conversation

Show the Impact of Responses on the Recommendations

“To build trust with shoppers, the best guided-selling experiences complete the story by telling shoppers why they’ve recommended particular choices.”

If you make recommendations without giving any rationale for them, shoppers become prone to skepticism. Imagine you are buying that laptop at a store: The salesperson asks you questions about your intended use, then simply ends the conversation by telling you to buy laptop model 123. Your first question would be “Why?” This is a natural consequence of an in-person selling situation, but for some reason, many online guided-selling experiences omit this important information. To build trust with shoppers, the best guided-selling experiences complete the story by telling shoppers why they’ve recommended particular choices.

Figure 11—Successful recommendations include their rationale, based on a shopper’s responses to questions

One option for making recommendations might be to show what impact a shopper’s answers to your initial questions would have on the results rather than simply displaying the recommendations on an explicit results page, as in the example shown in Figure 12. Before our study, we thought that this would be a very successful strategy. But our usability test results suggested that this approach too often adds unnecessary complexity to the questioning process. Many participants became distracted by the changing elements on the screen. They would have performed better if they had initially been asked questions, then reviewed the results separately.

Conclusion

“Guided-selling experiences are not for every audience. Some shoppers know exactly what they are looking for and just want to quickly find it and buy it.”

Guided-selling experiences are not for every audience. Some shoppers know exactly what they are looking for and just want to quickly find it and buy it. Other shoppers just don’t have the patience or inclination for conversational shopping experiences online. Guided selling should not be the only approach to shopping on a given Web site. However, for audiences who need an orientation to a product set and help making an informed decision, guided-selling experiences that follow the best practices that I’ve presented in this column offer the potential to be highly persuasive and effective shopping experiences.

4 Comments

Jonathan Baker-Bates wrote:

As a UX designer working for a site that sells complex products, I’d say that there are some other things to consider before deciding whether a guided selling technique will work well for customers and the business.

The first is that the products on sale must differentiate along the same lines as the guidance. For example, categorising running shoes in terms of comfort or support might seem like a good idea, but if the manufacturers don’t go to market like that (for example, Nike are basically a fashion brand) the choices customers make end up giving them seemingly random results. The guidance then comes across as a cynical sales technique masquerading as informed choice.

Another thing to keep in mind, depending on the UI execution, is that, until customers see the breadth and depth of inventory, they may well not know what they want. Hiding the inventory from them until they’ve gone through a decision tree of some kind may well be counterproductive. It may end up preventing customers converting on stuff they would have chosen had they known about it.

I didn’t know much about guided selling, so thank you for the information. Is this something that you have to do by yourself, or is this something that you need to have specific software for? I think this is what I need to make the experience better for my shoppers.

This is definitely something that requires specific software. Even the huge retailers—such as Walmart and Amazon—have their guided-selling tools built and implemented. iGoDigital, an Indianapolis-based company, has built guided-selling tools for Walmart, Best Buy, and others, so I strongly recommend them. I have connections at iGoDigital and would be glad to point you in the right direction of someone there if you would like me to.